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BRAINSICK RIVER by Gary J. Shipley

Excerpt from SPOOK NUTRITION a novel-in-progress

Crashing from malware, silt of my head grown inverted in schemes clogged with disarrangements of arrested self-cognizance to end up at me, at anything flowing and held alone in the vessel drowning in that cosmetic destiny of catalogues, the sick in drainrays of my starved monkeys peeling grenades for their jacuzzi meat god, torn watching me clawed like dead spiders and cursed into rivers, chewed mingling in lotions embodied by those obscene miles pervaded by fingers, by length and sculptural scenes rotted and tremulous in hovels of pneumatic breeding, of perceptions crawled through with unvarnished glimpses, our facsimiles screaming, straining against the accident, against vacant lingering recollections of some dreamed disservice made sentient on the lips of garaged islands, where men with metal fingers and eyes of scorched tinfoil study abnormalities caught supervening on the earth, murderous cup-swap slimes bounded in hoax hair and industrial light, their sunken interiors exhumed riddled with ante-chambers and uranium, their crag bones chasms sucked from the insides of rodent genitals, from jaws cast open like cold mathematical puddings doused in spotted visions and grotesque ciphers for the sake of our trembling quackeries of substance, its gulping performers blooded in folded parking-lots, the bodies and cars mangled in ventriloquist postures, tortured rhetorical inside scratches that never complete, and in our gloomriverblackness fucked fat with eels we hang unaware dying beset and bearing the raconteur foam of eternity, the nightmare stealth of medical songs featuring rare impregnations, chemo marrow ripe with the green pissy seed of inorganic children, their dexterity of violations unique in damp diseased archways where red giggling impedes surprise and where we scrutinize our tenderized fingers curling like crayfish, our senses drenched enraptured by spikes and portraitures of evil above the wriggling gates of our invisible restraints, above seas adapted from decaying ceilings clad in panicked improvisations, limbs held down in human holes drunk on the pen of some instinctive transmission, and what I found was the voice in a fragment of trees and a vortex in the junkyard darkness where suction became a proclivity, and us so frenzied in ourselves, our corpses novelties, comprehensions of error, my teeth to attention, spun up on massacres, all my fidelities to old agonies scarred blushing, their topography drooling, our apotheosis forcing sunrises from rotting perfumes and epithets on hotel walls as we pray through nights practiced in doorways, hidden behind the new perverseness of strangers, all faces bolted to their disappearance under the glare of one common obstruction, and we run into the gleaming viscera of morning, birds sold into pacts of stillness suffering voiceless, the water running black like vermin, its unseen feet divining the profusion of robots, bared brains curdling in the sun its victims floating inside us, my intricacies far off clustered in flyspeck heads and analised curses that I can’t pronounce freely, stolen in intervals of wreckage and acid glimpses of its grazing ivy leeching sinews and bone, the evening doubt lighting our withered casements, our soil centres, our lungs dangling in asthma